As such, their relationships would be immutable. Under a gold standard, exchange rates are not prices, but are more akin to conversion units, like 12 inches per foot, since under an international gold standard, every national currency unit would represent a specific weight of the same substance, i.e., gold. Duncan-Jones: roughly 20 billion sesterces, 880 tons of gold and 5,766 tons of silver. A much higher estimate, almost threefold, was suggested, for the '60 of the II century AD, by R.P. According to Goldsmith, at the end of the Augustan age the magnitude was in the order of some 7 billion sesterces, 3 billion in silver coins (that is, 2,895 tons of silver) and 4 billion in gold coins (that is, 309,6 tons of gold), plus a small amount of subsidiary coins. Scholars have proposed quite diverging estimates of the monetary stock in Roman imperial times. While estimates of Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates offer some basis for comparison, the absence of a remotely common basket of goods clouds the estimates. Changes in the total stock and relative prices of gold and silver produce subsantial divergences between ancient and modern prices calculated in the two metals. The confident parenthetical conversions prevalent in the literature of two centuries ago now pale in the face of a variety of methodolgical quandries. It is nearly impossible to compare the value of Roman money to that of modern times, for a variety of reasons.
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